Deadeye Specialization Updates for the Path of Fire Launch

[Arance.2698]

@Spinex.3695 said:Don't worry folks, this is an ever revolving product so watch for more changes in the future :)

Yes and no. There's this fundamental difference in perception between devs and players. To devs, pretty much all balance changes are just a few keystrokes away, if they decide on it. The game is an incredibly mutable thing because they see it every day, fiddling with ten different changes in an afternoon in the internal test environment. So they tend not to place much importance on any single snapshot of game state. Why should they? The game will always be different tomorrow than it is today, and they need only to decide their course of how it will be different.

But to players, the game can feel like a strangely static thing. We know there will be changes in the future, of some kind, but who's to say what they will be or when they will come? Not us. Trying to give feedback and asking for changes can often feel making sacrifices to the gods to curry favor, and doing rain dances to direct the clouds. We never know if it'll work, and when it does, we rarely know until it's actually happening. That's why players are all about that communication. It's a moment of insight to the god's mind before the commandments come down the mountain. While to devs, that same communication is time spent not getting things done. It can sometimes be productive, but usually isn't. Because at the end of the day, while players can be pretty good at pointing at problems, we often suck at articulating them in a useful way, and even worse at providing reasonable suggestions.

[Ghin.1653]

@Warrost.4895 said:

@messiah.1908 said:the only thing sniper need its unblockable ability. atm pvp sniper will be hard to use in mid high tier. but we could see d/p deadeye with 15%+21% dmg buff alongside quickness burst

Deadeye will be good at roleplaying and stomp new players.Beside that deadeye offers nothing viable for high pvp/every other playmode with minmax attitude.ehm, seemed to do just fine in pvp, the range alone gives it a large advantage with area's where he has the highground, ontop of the large burst damage output.all in all we shall see how players use it tomorrow

[Vavume.8065]

These changes really missed the mark, pun intended.

[Vermagus.7804]

Maybe it's just me, but.... I find it odd that there can be so much negative critique without actually playing ( in full) the elite spec with proper testing. All these theories without facts is mind blowing.

[Asur.9178]

@Vermagus.7804 said:Maybe it's just me, but.... I find it odd that there can be so much negative critique without actually playing ( in full) the elite spec with proper testing. All these theories without facts is mind blowing.

The "negative critique" are by those that already played it extensively and pointed out problem areas, which mostly went overlooked or was dismissed with bad excuses.

[kuyaDEAN.2785]

Wow. When I heard balance changes, I was wondering what got buffed since it was in such a rough spot.

But the only real change was a nerf? Why? It's already initiative starved trying to spam the the now nerfed skill to build might stacks. That aside, with malice both building so slowly AND THEN resetting after a length of time it's loses out on so much damage.

Add that the class needs too much set up time to bring in pvp (waiting for malice when other classes can just get in there and cleave from the get go) and with bounties almost always having that modifer that makes them immune to ranged attacks, what good is dead eye even for? Granted, you can use the rifle in close range, but again, at that point why not be stabbing them? Malice alone doesn't make up for daredevil's damage modifers in close range.

It feels like the only saving grace of this spec is that it didn't cannibalize an already existing tree's traits. (Cough, daredevil and acrobatics, cough.)

[EnderzShadow.2506]

@Arance.2698 said:

@Spinex.3695 said:Don't worry folks, this is an ever revolving product so watch for more changes in the future :)

Yes and no. There's this fundamental difference in perception between devs and players. To devs, pretty much all balance changes are just a few keystrokes away, if they decide on it. The game is an incredibly mutable thing because they see it every day, fiddling with ten different changes in an afternoon in the internal test environment. So they tend not to place much importance on any single snapshot of game state. Why should they? The game will always be different tomorrow than it is today, and they need only to decide their course of how it will be different.

But to players, the game can feel like a strangely static thing. We know there will be changes in the future, of some kind, but who's to say what they will be or when they will come? Not us. Trying to give feedback and asking for changes can often feel making sacrifices to the gods to curry favor, and doing rain dances to direct the clouds. We never know if it'll work, and when it does, we rarely know until it's actually happening. That's why players are all about that communication. It's a moment of insight to the god's mind before the commandments come down the mountain. While to devs, that same communication is time spent not getting things done. It can sometimes be productive, but usually isn't.

"Because at the end of the day, while players can be pretty good at pointing at problems, we often kitten at articulating them in a useful way, and even worse at providing reasonable suggestions."

I was with you till the end. There have been plenty of reasonable suggestions in perfectly acceptable formats.The devs are not interested in suggestions. They never will be.

In WoW there were player representatives that worked with the dev teams.Does anything like that exist in GW2? Has any real effort been made to do something similar in GW2?

Honestly I think Anet is a small company, strapped for resources and they are doing the best they can with a limited budget.Would anyone from Anet actually say this publicly? Of course not.

[Game of Bones.8975]

The only change I would still like to see is using movement keys to get out of the kneel position.I'm waiting to play for a while before deciding what other changes I would like to see.

[shippage.1983]

The only change I really wanted to see with Deadeye was ways to break crouch. It can feel awkward restricting movement.

What if shadowstep/blinks broke crouch?

Also would be cool if you held a movement key a few seconds that it would automatically break crouch.

[kuyaDEAN.2785]

@Arance.2698 said:Thanks for the response, Robert. Your reasoning on each of these points makes sense, but, all the feedback for deadeye is making it clear that something is off with the spec. I haven't played enough to pass judgement on balance, but deadeye, even more than normal, is obviously teetering on the razor's edge. Stacking multiplying buffs is dangerous cause it turns a minor change of 1 into a major change of 10, and losing 16% on the main dps skill is very worrying. But more importantly than numbers, deadeye feels clunky to play, fiddly to line up, and frustrating to maintain. Mark and kneeling are pure set up skills that don't feel very fun to use because they have significant casting/animations, don't contribute any immediate damage or effect, and their real impact feels disconnected and hidden due to the huge delay of malice generation. Removing the cast on mark helps because even if it's not doing a kitten thing for you now, at least it's not annoying to use up front. I completely understand your desire to keep it for balance, but you're likely going to have to toss it and eat your balance elsewhere because the feel is really bad right now. As for kneel, perhaps a compromise can be reached, and holding a movement direction for ~.5 seconds breaks kneel? (EDIT: Jump to break is probably the better idea.)

Still, when we're talking feel of the spec, malice really is the main subject here. Malice is frustrating because it feels like waiting until your character is able to start operating at full capacity. It comes off as less of a bonus and more a mandatory wait period before becoming effective. Acquire target, wait at least 10 seconds to be a real threat. Enemy dies? Wait 10 more. Switch targets? Wait 10 more. Recast mark? Wait 10 more. Spend 15 seconds fighting? Wait 10 more. On paper it might look like a smooth increase of the power curve, but to the player it's like waiting for the real fight to start. Malice should feel like the build up to beast mode, the climax that all our previous fighting was building to. Instead it feels like a jerky series of false starts, of praying for the stars to finally align because we lack any real control over them. That's really why people are asking for faster generation, or removing some of the resets, or slow stack decay. It's not dps greed, but because it feels like while everyone else is able to hit the ground running, we're stuck here waiting on the timer only to get the rug constantly pulled out from under us.

(Thinking on it, if it were up to me, I'd probably try an even more radical revamp of malice. Have it generated by hitting skills on the mark instead of a timer, greatly reduce or eliminate it's bonuses outside death's judgement, have it slow decay instead of instant reset, having death's judgement consume all stacks of malice on hit. Gives the player a sense of actively participating in it's generation, eliminating constant false starts, a goal it's building toward, and a climatic moment/skill that is the clearly defined reward for building it. Granted, that'd take a big rebalance of the spec to work with it, but it'd feel great.)

EDIT: Radical, pie-in-the-sky idea for Kneel. Make it an automatic effect that occurs when the deadeye stands still for ~1 second. Breaks on movement and other things. Seperate death's judgement to be the new 5 skill. Rewards immobility without tying your own foot down. An unrealistic ask I suppose, but fun to throw out there.

I mentioned my grievances with the spec before, but you super hit the nail on the head about how it FEELS playing deadeye. Just waiting to hit your full potential, and then having your buzz killed by your stacks up and disappearing is the most frustrating thing.

[roamzero.9486]

If I recall correctly, part of the clunkyness of kneel and dodging out of it was the flip it made on the toolbar, as if you were switching out of it, and then it would automatically switch back (but this wouldn't flip back after a CC which can be hard to notice in a busy fight, leading to even more confusion on the state of your kneel). I may be misremembering the beta though.

As for further feedback, I'd like to see a condi component added to the stealthed kneel attack, maybe like 3 stacks of bleed or confusion or even a non-damaging condition like cripple/slow/weakness, because from the beta I felt like condi panic-strike deadeye had some real potential but it needed some more oomph.

[Zacchary.6183]

@Asur.9178 said:

@Vermagus.7804 said:Maybe it's just me, but.... I find it odd that there can be so much negative critique without actually playing ( in full) the elite spec with proper testing. All these theories without facts is mind blowing.

The "negative critique" are by those that already played it extensively and pointed out problem areas, which mostly went overlooked or was dismissed with bad excuses.

I will have to disagree. There are plenty of other thieves that have continued to work on the Deadeye through theorycrafting well after the betas and they usually have neutral to positive feelings towards the new elite spec. In fact, most of the ones I know are still talking about it like it will push thief into a more competitive state and all of them participate in either PvP or WvW.

[Amante.8109]

@Karl McLain.5604 said:

• Death's Retreat: Fixed a bug that prevented this trait from working with Assassin's Reward and Lead Attacks
• Rifle: Fixed an issue where rifle skills could not be reflected properly
• Spotter Shot: Changed this animation from a hip shot to an aimed shot animation.
• Deadeye's Mark: Fixed a bad interaction with Hidden Thief that allowed mark to be canceled in order to grant stealth.
• Three-Round-Burst (Kneeling): Reduced damage by about 16%

And here I thought you guys had learned a few lessons from Heart of Thorns. These minor changes do nothing to address any of the feedback given, and in fact make the spec WEAKER. You might think us players are bad game designers, but here's a piece of advice: if people aren't using a central skill as much / the way you want them to (Death's Judgment), the solution is to IMPROVE THAT SKILL, not nerf the one they were using instead (Three-Round Burst).

Where are the usability improvements to Kneel? Where are the improvements to Malice stacking? Where are ANY changes not having to do with bugs that also happen to mostly be nerfs? Guess it'll take 8-12 months to whip Thief's elite specialization into acceptable shape, AGAIN. I will not be purchasing PoF until after that happens, and somehow I doubt I'm the only one.

[Saraneth.6021]

@Asur.9178 said:

@Glael.7643 said:Three-Round-Burst (Kneeling): Reduced damage by about 16%Sure about this? I mean every other class being ranged still got mobility.Whilst Deadeye will have 0 mobility during kneeling. Imo if Deadeye should be played as sniper there should even be a chance of 1- shot kills (which it doesn't have even before reducing)sry to say this but nerfing damage is a bit odd for a sniper based class if you'd go by logic.Ever seen a sniper needing 2-3 shots to kill the target? I didn't xD

You're better off playing a LB/GS Soulbeast. Trust me. The damage on them is absurdly high and comes out faster, while offering your more sustainability, along with stealth, cc, blocks, and more. Oh, and the cherry on top? They can hit you from 1700-1800 range while moving around.

And there is the problem. Deadeye have to sacrifice their mobility. Their damage should be significantly higher as a trade off, but right now it's not. We sacrifice our mobility but still have lower ranged dmg than other classes that can move.

[Amante.8109]

Edit: Mispost

[Jinks.2057]

Are people really surprised that TRB was nerfed?!?

I was bursting people for 30-45k with it. You'll still be doing insane damage

[Amante.8109]

Now that I got a bit of venting out of the way...

@"Robert Gee.9246" said:Robert, I really appreciate your attempt to open a dialogue. A willingness to show up goes a LONG way, especially for a community that feels like it's been neglected over time (as Thief, Ranger, and Necro seem to). Just entering into those environments means navigating some amount of skepticism and hostility, and that's obviously no fun to deal with. I can also sympathize with how frustratingly opaque player feedback can be. Players don't have the same perspective as those working on the game; we don't know what is going on internally or what changes are in the pipeline. All we can go by is what we currently see, and what is being communicated by ArenaNet. While it's easy to forget, silence is also a form of communication, one that does not go unnoticed.

Everyone wants to enjoy their class(es) of choice and to feel powerful, but I think developers misread this at times. The key word there is FEEL... if a class/spec FEELS bad then its power level is ultimately irrelevant to most. What the reasonable people on this forum have been trying to communicate is that the spec FEELS bad. No one knows what its relative power or potential ceiling is, although many of us are optimistic on that note. The bigger issue is, again, how clunky and unpolished so many elements of Deadeye FEEL. Unfortunately, this is not the first time we've had this problem (see: Daredevil from HoT beta to around a year after release).

We do read a lot of the feedback on these forums, but listening to feedback is not the same as acting on feedback. Additionally we do not have time to respond to every post on the forum. I'm responding to this on my own time after work and the reason we've actually had time to respond today to your replies is because we are in a "calm before the storm" situation right before the game launches. I don't expect that we'll have nearly as much time after the 22nd.This is why people are frustrated. We understand that launching an expansion is an especially busy time, which is all the more reason to gather and respond to feedback BEFORE you get overwhelmed running triage. No one reasonably expects that EVERY post will be responded to. What we expect is that our months of feedback will be heard and then communicated back to us, whether or not that feedback leads to the changes we would like to see. The most important part is feeling HEARD, and the Thief community hasn't felt heard for a VERY LONG time.

I think we can all agree that communication is important, but we can't spend our time here promising you that we are listening when we should be working to improve the game.I hate to say it, but making a class fun to play IS improving the game. I've noticed a tendency over time for developers to decouple the feel of playing a class from the overall game experience itself, which is a catastrophic error. Whether you play one class or multiple (and I think more people just play one than you guys are willing to admit), how the class(es) you play FEEL deeply impacts your time with the game. When people are telling you in droves that a class/spec simply FEELS BAD TO PLAY, this is something you should take very seriously. We have yet to hear anything that suggests ArenaNet understands this.

• Cast time on Mark - Marking a target is intended as a commitment, and the added power of malice plus the refresh ability on kill afforded to Deadeye means that that some power balance needed to be made elsewhere.Basically everyone is going to disagree with you on this, and for good reason. Balance issues aside, using Mark FEELS terrible. Thief is a class based around speed and split-second precision, and anything that gets in the way of that is going to feel especially bad in a way that might be hard for people who don't play high APM classes to understand. I get that you have to maintain balance, but adding clunkiness to core class mechanics is not the way to do it. As designers, there are other levers you can adjust to compensate for Mark being instant. It also bears mentioning that having a core class mechanic go from being instant to having a cast time after equipping an elite spec feels awful PERIOD, even without considering all the other ways it negatively affects Deadeye.

• Moving Breaks Kneel - Kneel is intended to be a mode that requires forethought and planning, but we want to allow you to dodge roll when attacks come in. There are players that use doubletap to roll, so movement breaking kneel is not an option.Understandable from a design perspective. That said, the most common suggestion other than movement breaking kneel is for jumping to, and I see no reason this should not be possible. Also, as others have noted, dodging from Kneel can temporarily change the bar in and out of the stance in a way that can feel very disorienting. Hopefully you can address these issues soon, as Kneel is a core component of Thief Rifle.

• Malice Generation Rate - Speed of Malice generation is something that ties very closely with Deadeye's power. We'd like to watch it more before making changes to it.It's a little early to comment on Malice generation, but it still feels slow. As others have noted, if you want Death's Judgement to be our main damage skill then it needs to scale with Malice differently than it currently does. PvP-wise, it'd also help if DJ wasn't the most telegraphed and easily avoidable projectile in recent memory. Seriously, you can WALK out of its way, no dodging required.

Again, thank you for opening a dialogue. While I know you guys are about to be even busier, I hope you continue to communicate with us, even if it's to say "we're busy as heck and we're not going to be able to address X issue for a little while, but it's on our radar". I have a feeling that you guys operate on the assumption that "no news is better than bad news", but trust me... it's not. Prolonged radio silence means we have no idea of whether issues will be addressed not just soon, but EVER.

Thankfully, ArenaNet has the power to change that. The question is... will you?

[Zacchary.6183]

@Saraneth.6021 said:

@Asur.9178 said:

@Glael.7643 said:Three-Round-Burst (Kneeling): Reduced damage by about 16%Sure about this? I mean every other class being ranged still got mobility.Whilst Deadeye will have 0 mobility during kneeling. Imo if Deadeye should be played as sniper there should even be a chance of 1- shot kills (which it doesn't have even before reducing)sry to say this but nerfing damage is a bit odd for a sniper based class if you'd go by logic.Ever seen a sniper needing 2-3 shots to kill the target? I didn't xD

You're better off playing a LB/GS Soulbeast. Trust me. The damage on them is absurdly high and comes out faster, while offering your more sustainability, along with stealth, cc, blocks, and more. Oh, and the cherry on top? They can hit you from 1700-1800 range while moving around.

And there is the problem. Deadeye have to sacrifice their mobility. Their damage should be significantly higher as a trade off, but right now it's not. We sacrifice our mobility but still have lower ranged dmg than other classes that can move.

Rifle 4 standing is a near instant shadowstep away from your target. If it works without target, then mobility won't be that much of a problem.

[Gray.9041]

@Amante.8109 said:Now that I got a bit of venting out of the way...

clipping for readability

This entire post is really well put, seems pretty well reasoned and doesn't strike me as an emotional lashing out at all. I agree with many of the points made as well.

@Zacchary.6183 said:

@Saraneth.6021 said:

@Asur.9178 said:

@Glael.7643 said:Three-Round-Burst (Kneeling): Reduced damage by about 16%Sure about this? I mean every other class being ranged still got mobility.Whilst Deadeye will have 0 mobility during kneeling. Imo if Deadeye should be played as sniper there should even be a chance of 1- shot kills (which it doesn't have even before reducing)sry to say this but nerfing damage is a bit odd for a sniper based class if you'd go by logic.Ever seen a sniper needing 2-3 shots to kill the target? I didn't xD

You're better off playing a LB/GS Soulbeast. Trust me. The damage on them is absurdly high and comes out faster, while offering your more sustainability, along with stealth, cc, blocks, and more. Oh, and the cherry on top? They can hit you from 1700-1800 range while moving around.

And there is the problem. Deadeye have to sacrifice their mobility. Their damage should be significantly higher as a trade off, but right now it's not. We sacrifice our mobility but still have lower ranged dmg than other classes that can move.

Rifle 4 standing is a near instant shadowstep away from your target. If it works without target, then mobility won't be that much of a problem.

You're looking at it wrong. using rifle 4 without target out of combat might work, but so does having a shortbow in your bag. People are talking about in-combat mobility, where deadeye really doesn't have anything by design.

[Zlater.6789]

Wow I dunno what to feel, maybe nothing?

It sorts just reinforces how useless this will be, it is something I will try once, appreciate the visuals and sounds, then probably never pick it up again. So many missed opportunities with this I think.

Just a quick question, as developers did you use backward reasoning when you were designing the new specs? Or did you blindly just go let's do this and lol let's see what happens?

[Zacchary.6183]

@Gray.9041The Rifle skills have enough mobility to get away. There Swiftness on standing2 and a very quick gap opener on standing 4. Rifle with Silent Scope also offers more opportunities to stealth than d/p as the stealth from kneeling costs less. Combine this with the 50% run speed in stealth in SA and Rifle barely has any more mobility problems than the rest of the profession, in or out of combat.

Why are people expecting a sniper spec to have mobility anyway?

[Laosduude.1690]

Good thing I've refunded PoF, dont look too happy with the changes for the initial start of an interesting expansion. I got other games to dump money on until Deadeye gets some decent changes that were mentioned by the community after the demo weekend.

[Laosduude.1690]

Good thing I've refunded PoF, dont look too happy with the changes for the initial start of an interesting expansion. I got other games to dump money on until Deadeye gets some decent changes that were mentioned by the community after the demo weekend.

[Zenith.7301]

@Warrost.4895 said:

@Heimskarl Ashfiend.9582 said:

@Razor.9872 said:

@Paulie.6215 said:3 bug fixes and a 16% nerf on TRB.

All other classes received , for the most part, SEVERAL updates and thieves get this?

Here's to hoping thieves don't become an afterthought........again.

All in all,

not

happy at all.

Warrior and Ranger are about in the same boat.

Take a look at Scourge.

Honestly, the QQ that happens after every patch change is so immature and yet so hilarious.

ANet hates my class

QQ on every. Single. Sub-forum. lol

Tbh zero percent of the issues of deadeye were addressed, while for example mirage got very much.

Mirage got virtually nothing of worth for PvE.

I'll trade you Mirage for Deadeye in PvE any day, any time. At least you actually do damage.

[Zlater.6789]

@Amante.8109 said:Now that I got a bit of venting out of the way...

@"Robert Gee.9246" said:Robert, I really appreciate your attempt to open a dialogue. A willingness to show up goes a LONG way, especially for a community that feels like it's been neglected over time (as Thief, Ranger, and Necro seem to). Just entering into those environments means navigating some amount of skepticism and hostility, and that's obviously no fun to deal with. I can also sympathize with how frustratingly opaque player feedback can be. Players don't have the same perspective as those working on the game; we don't know what is going on internally or what changes are in the pipeline. All we can go by is what we currently see, and what is being communicated by ArenaNet. While it's easy to forget, silence is also a form of communication,

one that does not go unnoticed

.

Everyone wants to enjoy their class(es) of choice and to feel powerful, but I think developers misread this at times. The key word there is

FEEL

... if a class/spec

FEELS

bad then its power level is ultimately irrelevant to most. What the reasonable people on this forum have been trying to communicate is that the spec

FEELS

bad. No one knows what its relative power or potential ceiling is, although many of us are optimistic on that note. The bigger issue is, again, how clunky and unpolished so many elements of Deadeye

FEEL

. Unfortunately, this is not the first time we've had this problem (see: Daredevil from HoT beta to around a year after release).

We do read a lot of the feedback on these forums, but

listening to feedback is not the same as acting on feedback

. Additionally

we do not have time to respond to every post on the forum

. I'm responding to this on my own time after work and the reason we've actually had time to respond today to your replies is because we are in a "calm before the storm" situation right before the game launches. I don't expect that we'll have nearly as much time after the 22nd.This is why people are frustrated. We understand that launching an expansion is an especially busy time, which is all the more reason to gather and respond to feedback

BEFORE

you get overwhelmed running triage. No one reasonably expects that

EVERY

post will be responded to. What we expect is that our months of feedback will be heard and then communicated back to us, whether or not that feedback leads to the changes we would like to see. The most important part is feeling

HEARD

, and the Thief community hasn't felt heard for a

VERY LONG

time.

I think we can all agree that communication is important, but we can't spend our time here promising you that we are listening when we should be working to improve the game.I hate to say it, but making a class fun to play

IS

improving the game. I've noticed a tendency over time for developers to decouple the feel of playing a class from the overall game experience itself, which is a

catastrophic

error. Whether you play one class or multiple (and I think more people just play one than you guys are willing to admit), how the class(es) you play

FEEL

deeply impacts your time with the game. When people are telling you in droves that a class/spec simply

FEELS BAD TO PLAY

, this is something you should take very seriously. We have yet to hear anything that suggests ArenaNet understands this.

• Cast time on Mark - Marking a target is intended as a commitment, and the added power of malice plus the refresh ability on kill afforded to Deadeye means that that some power balance needed to be made elsewhere.Basically everyone is going to disagree with you on this, and for good reason. Balance issues aside, using Mark
  FEELS
  terrible. Thief is a class based around speed and split-second precision, and anything that gets in the way of that is going to feel especially bad in a way that might be hard for people who don't play high APM classes to understand. I get that you have to maintain balance, but adding clunkiness to core class mechanics is not the way to do it. As designers, there are other levers you can adjust to compensate for Mark being instant. It also bears mentioning that having a core class mechanic go from being instant to having a cast time after equipping an elite spec feels awful
  PERIOD
  , even without considering all the other ways it negatively affects Deadeye.

• Moving Breaks Kneel - Kneel is intended to be a mode that requires forethought and planning, but we want to allow you to dodge roll when attacks come in. There are players that use doubletap to roll, so movement breaking kneel is not an option.Understandable from a design perspective. That said, the most common suggestion other than movement breaking kneel is for jumping to, and I see no reason this should not be possible. Also, as others have noted, dodging from Kneel can temporarily change the bar in and out of the stance in a way that can feel very disorienting. Hopefully you can address these issues soon, as Kneel is a core component of Thief Rifle.

• Malice Generation Rate - Speed of Malice generation is something that ties very closely with Deadeye's power. We'd like to watch it more before making changes to it.It's a little early to comment on Malice generation, but it still feels slow. As others have noted, if you want Death's Judgement to be our main damage skill then it needs to scale with Malice differently than it currently does. PvP-wise, it'd also help if DJ wasn't the most telegraphed and easily avoidable projectile in recent memory. Seriously, you can
  WALK
  out of its way, no dodging required.

Again, thank you for opening a dialogue. While I know you guys are about to be even busier, I hope you continue to communicate with us, even if it's to say "we're busy as heck and we're not going to be able to address X issue for a little while, but it's on our radar". I have a feeling that you guys operate on the assumption that "no news is better than bad news", but trust me...

it's not

. Prolonged radio silence means we have no idea of whether issues will be addressed not just soon, but

EVER

.

Thankfully, ArenaNet has the power to change that. The question is... will you?

I just want to repost what Amante is saying here for exposure. You couldn't write it better, I just know that because this thread is getting long now and people aren't especially quick to read longer posts, this would go unnoticed if we don't highlight what he is saying.

Just to add to it, this sort of communication with the players who participated in the beta, is probably something that should happen before you decide to launch. I personally think releasing deadeye like this will be a mistake, your customers are very obviously not happy with the product you are trying to sell them.